The anatomy of an obsession
David Profumo
THE LONGEST SILENCE: A LIFE IN FISHING
by Thomas McGuane Yellow Jersey Press, £17, pp. 280 by Thomas McGuane Yellow Jersey Press, £17, pp. 280 When the late Norman Maclean was trying to get his first work of fiction pub- lished, it was rejected by one New York editor because the stories had trees in them; A River Runs Through It eventually became a cult movie, and caused an upsurge of voguish interest in flyfishing, plus a spate of derivative writing about epiphanic waterscapes and male bonding. For a while there in the Nineties it seemed that angling was the new rock 'n roll, and it is greatly to his credit that Thomas McGuane eschews such flimflam and flam- boyance in his latest book, concentrating instead on the essential experience of the sport to which he has long been in thrall. The result is as subtle and sublime a volume on this subject as I have ever encountered.
Given the parlous state of our own halieutic literature, I hope The Longest Silence is widely read over here. Once a bright tributary of mainstream letters, British angling writing has become silted up with technicalities and most of the worthwhile prose is coming from the States where there are still authors who are, inter alia, aware of the relationship between pis- catorial narrative and literary fiction. We desperately need another Arthur Ransome. Meanwhile, McGuane shows how a novel- ist can bring to the pages of sport those qualities of tension, nuance and dark humour that make his own fiction glimmer — this collection of 33 essays is a model of its type, the anatomy of an obsession.
`Early on, I decided that fishing would be my way of looking at the world,' he explains, and his close encounters are both quirky and intense, whether he's meeting the elite of the Golden Gate Angling and Casting Club, or discussing Neruda on the banks of an Icelandic stream. There are sea trout in Tierra del Fuego, and tarpon as strong as mustangs off Florida. In Labrador, every time he hooks a salmon the guide shouts, Took, wot spawt!' The persona behind these stories is modest, shrewd, a bit grizzled, and possessed of that gallows humour crucial for any sane per- spective on this anomalous pursuit and its various mesmeric attractions. He writes outstandingly of ceremonial aspects — rig- ging rods, launching skiffs — but has little time for 'the technocracy of modern angling', so folks who study bug Latin and like to speak deep entomology, or need manuals to specify precisely which type of squirrel urine is required to dye the throat hackle feather of a Krakatoa Killer, had best shop elsewhere.
I finished the book after a raw day on the loch, a damp gundog at my feet and by my elbow a glass of malt as febrifuge — a con- text I feel sure our author would appreci- ate, for as well as being a confessio piscatoris this book celebrates the Great Outdoors in general, wherein he finds 'soli- tude, which is not, take note, the same thing as loneliness'. His Walden has been properly digested, and there is precious lit- tle mysticism here; his essays on other writ- ers make clear his suspicion of the mawkish, picturesque and competitive. As with all sensible anglers, his challenge is Nature itself.
For saltwater flyfishing especially he has the passion of a true zealot. In 'Southern Salt' he evokes the Florida Keys of the Six- ties, a place of barflies, bonefish bums and feuding guides that is as swashbuckling as any horse opera or cow country tale from his own Western novels, whilst in the title essay he explores how it is the silent inter- vals between the action that defines his view of the pastime. His obsession with catching a permit (trachinotus falcatus is such an elusive quarry that it's like 'trying to bait a tiger with watermelons') is one I share, and, having finally caught a large specimen this year off Cuba, I can testify that this essay strikes right at the heart of the matter.
`All my dad cares about is the f-word,' his young daughter informed some strangers, assuming it referred to fishing. `When he's not doing it, he's reading about it.'
Fook, wot spawt!
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